A small, brown man in a dark, open-collar shirt steps briskly toward us. He is Monkombu Swaminathan and he welcomes us to the agricultural research foundation he established 16 years ago.

This is “an investment in the livelihood of the poor,” he explains as we stroll the perimeter of the center garden, “to mobilize the best technology to the reach the poorest of the poor. It is pro-nature, pro-women and pro-poor.”

India’s Borlaug. Swaminathan is India’s Norman Borlaug, the Iowa farmboy who became the father of the then-Third World’s Green Revolution.

Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was the scientific pile driver that developed new wheat and rice varieties which quickly quadrupled food production in the 1960s throughout hungry Asia and Latin America.

If Borlaug was the way, Swaminathan was the means.

Geneticist. As a young geneticist, he used Borlaug’s new seeds to turn India’s centuries-empty begging bowl into an overflowing breadbasket almost overnight.

That pivotal role earned him the first World Food Prize, an award initiated by Borlaug, in 1987.

A year later, Swaminathan used the prize’s $250,000 as seed to plant the research center in whose cool shade we now stand.

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Alan Guebert was raised on an 800-acre, 100-cow southern Illinois dairy farm. After graduation from the University of Illinois in 1980, he served as a writer and editor at Professional Farmers of America, Successful Farming magazine and Farm Journal magazine. His syndicated agricultural column, The Farm and Food File, began in June, 1993, and now appears weekly in more than 70 publications throughout the U.S. and Canada. He and spouse Catherine, a social worker, have two adult children. farmandfoodfile.com